Some cartoons on the Iranian election

Chatham House/St Andrew’s University report casts serious doubt on Iranian victory claims

Chatham House has published a paper titled Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election (available here as a pdf document).

Written by Professor Ali Ansari, Daniel Berman and Thomas Rintoul of the Institute of Iranian Studies, St Andrew’s University the report casts serious doubts on the plausibility of the claimed victory and demonstrates irregularities in the official results.

According to the press release (I just can’t work out how to copy salient ponts from the pdf document!) the official statistics indicate that:

• claims that Ahmadinejad swept the board in rural provinces flies in the face of previous results

• The plausibility of Mr Ahmadinejad's claimed victory is called into question by figures that show that in several provinces he would have had to attract the votes of all new voters, all the votes of his former centrist opponent, and up to 44% of those who voted for reformist candidates in 2005.

• Irregularities are found in conservative Mazandaran and Yazd provinces where votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters.

Professor Ali Ansari said: 'The analysis shows that the scale of the swing to Ahmadinejad would have had to have been extraordinary to achieve the stated result'. Thomas Rintoul said: 'The claimed results in minority provinces are particularity extreme, the numbers from Ilam, Lorestan and Hormozegan almost defy belief'."

This is just a summary of the executive summary. The whole paper is well worth reading. It certainly does confirm suspicions that the election was rigged an a gigantic scale

Vote recount in Iran?

According to the BBC (and many other sources) Iran's Guardian Council says it is ready to recount disputed votes from Friday's presidential poll.

The Guardian Council said votes would be recounted in areas contested by the losing candidates but it is not clear whether the offer will be accepted by Mr Ahmadinejad's rivals, who want the election annulled. The opposition says millions of ballots may have gone astray.

The council, which is considering an appeal by Mr Mousavi and another defeated candidate, had earlier said the results were only provisional.

This is certainly an interesting development but whether it will signify much in the end remains to be seen.

Iranian government fires on protestors

The BBC reports that shots have been fired at a rally in Iran where hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating against last week's presidential election results. One protestor is reported to have been killed while numerous reports indicates that many others have been wounded

The BBC's Jon Leyne, in Tehran, says Monday's rally was the biggest demonstration in the Islamic republic's 30-year history and described it as a "political earthquake. The government had outlawed any protest following two days of unrest, with the interior ministry warning that "any disrupter of public security would be dealt with according to the law".

"There has been sporadic shooting out there... I can see people running here," Reuters quoted a reporter of Iran's Press TV as saying from Tehran's Azadi Square. "A number of people who are armed, I don't know exactly who they are, but they have started to fire on people causing havoc in Azadi Square." A photographer at the scene told news agencies that security forces had killed one protester and seriously wounded several others.

He said the shooting began when the crowd attacked a compound used by the Basij a religious militia linked to the country's powerful Revolutionary Guard.

So it begins. I shudder to think how it will end, how many will die.

Khamenei orders election inquiry

It would seem that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reversed his earlier decree that the Iranian Presidential election result was fair(ly rigged) and has ordered an investigation into the disputed re-election of President Ahmadinejad.

Khamenei, who has the final say on such matters, had described the result as fair and urged the country to unite behind Mr Ahmadinejad. Today it emerged, however, that he had met the defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi last night and ordered the powerful Guardians Council to examine his allegations of vote-rigging.

Ahmadinejad is Khamenei’s placeman so it is extremely unlikely that the result will be overturned. I somehow doubt that the Guardian Council will find any “irregularities”... After all the powers that be in Iran are hardly going to air their own dirty laundry.